The effects of lisdexamfetamine dimesylate on eating behaviour and homeostatic, reward and cognitive processes in women with binge-eating symptoms: an experimental medicine study

Lisdexamfetamine dimesylate (LDX) is the only drug currently approved by the FDA for the treatment of Binge-Eating Disorder (BED), but little is known about the behavioural mechanisms that underpin the efficacy of LDX in treating BED. We examined the behavioural and neural effects of an acute dose of LDX (50 mg) in 22 women with binge-eating symptomatology using a randomised, crossover, double-blind, placebo-controlled experimental medicine design. LDX reduced self-reported appetite ratings and intake of both a pasta meal and a palatable cookie snack. LDX also decreased the eating rate of pasta but not of cookies and reduced self-reported liking ratings for pasta at the end of the meal. When viewing food pictures during an fMRI scan, LDX reduced activity bilaterally in the thalamus. LDX enhanced sustained attention and reduced impulsive responding in a continuous performance task but had no effect on emotional bias or working memory. These results suggest the observed effects of LDX on food intake (and by implication the efficacy of LDX in treating BED) may be related to the actions of the drug to enhance satiety, reduce food-related reward responding when full and/or increase cognitive control. Novel pharmacotherapies for BED might be most effective if they have a broad spectrum of effects on appetite, reward and cognition.

Perceiving the Self and Emotions with an Anxious Mind: Evidence from an Implicit Perceptual Task

Anxiety disorders cause mental distress and low wellbeing in many people worldwide. Theories of anxiety describe negative worldviews and self-views as maintaining factors of the disorders. Recent research in social cognition has found a link between depression and altered perceptual biases to emotions, but the same research on anxiety is still missing. In this study, we measured perceptual biases to emotional and self-related stimuli in sub-clinically anxious participants and healthy controls using a self-emotional shape-label matching task. Results demonstrate that anxious participants had a diminished perceptual self-bias compared with healthy controls. Furthermore, the severity of anxiety was related to an emotional bias towards valanced other-related stimuli. The findings confirm the hypothesis that anxious individuals display an altered self-prioritisation effect in comparison with healthy individuals and that anxiety severity is linked to altered responses to emotionally valanced others. These findings have potential implications for early diagnosis and treatment of anxiety disorders.

Recall and Self-Relevance of Emotional Words Predict Subjective Self-Evaluation of Cognition in Patients with MTLE with or without Depressive Symptoms

We examined whether word processing is associated with subjective self-evaluation of cognition in patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE) as a function of their depressive symptoms. MTLE patients with (MTLE +d, N = 28) or without (MTLE -d, N = 11) depression were compared to pair-matched healthy control participants on free recall and self-relevance ratings of emotionally valenced words. Correlation and hierarchical analyses were conducted to investigate whether the subjective self-evaluation of cognition in MTLE patients is predicted by the negative emotional bias reflected in task performance. MTLE +d patients endorsed as self-relevant fewer positive words and more negative words than the MTLE -d patients and healthy participants. They also self-evaluated their cognition poorer than the MTLE -d patients. Analyses indicated that recall and self-endorsement of emotional words predicted both self-evaluation of cognition as well as epilepsy duration. Our findings indicate that negative self-relevance emotional bias is observed in MTLE patients and is predictive of subjective self-evaluation of cognition. Application of brief behavioral tasks probing emotional functions could be valuable for clinical research and practice in the patients with MTLE.

Entrepreneurial orientation and emotional bias in MSMEs’ financing and performance

There have been numerous studies investigating the dynamics of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) development. However, this research topic still offers several interesting research gaps to be explored. Accordingly, the purpose of this research is to test the effects of entrepreneurial orientation and asymmetric information that affect MSME entrepreneurs’ emotional biases, as well as the relationships between these variables and MSME’s financing and performance. Our research objects are MSMEs located in four urban villages in Salatiga City, Central Java that engage in various business sectors, such as the food and beverage, the service industry, the groceryw, and the horticulture sector. We analyze the research data with the Partial Least Square (PLS) software. The research results reveal that entrepreneurial orientation and asymmetric information positively influence MSME entrepreneurs’ emotional bias. Meanwhile, emotional bias has a significantly positive influence on financing. Finally, we also find that financing positively affects MSMEs’ performance. In sum, our study demonstrates the importance of the behavioral aspect (emotional bias) in explaining MSMEs’ performance through its indirect impact through financing.

Emotional bias training as a treatment for anxiety and depression: evidence from experimental medicine studies in healthy and medicated samples

Background Anxiety and depression are leading causes of disability worldwide, yet individuals are often unable to access appropriate treatment. There is a need to develop effective interventions that can be delivered remotely. Previous research has suggested that emotional processing biases are a potential target for intervention, and these may be altered through brief training programs. Methods We report two experimental medicine studies of emotional bias training in two samples: individuals from the general population (n = 522) and individuals currently taking antidepressants to treat anxiety or depression (n = 212). Participants, recruited online, completed four sessions of EBT from their own home. Mental health and cognitive functioning outcomes were assessed at baseline, immediately post-training, and at 2-week follow-up. Results In both studies, our intervention successfully trained participants to perceive ambiguous social information more positively. This persisted at a 2-week follow-up. There was no clear evidence that this change in emotional processing transferred to improvements in symptoms in the primary analyses. However, in both studies, there was weak evidence for improved quality of life following EBT amongst individuals with more depressive symptoms at baseline. No clear evidence of transfer effects was observed for self-reported daily stress, anhedonia or depressive symptoms. Exploratory analyses suggested that younger participants reported greater treatment gains. Conclusions These studies demonstrate the effectiveness of delivering a multi-session online training program to promote lasting cognitive changes. Given the inconsistent evidence for transfer effects, EBT requires further development before it can be considered as a treatment for anxiety and depression.

Negative and Positive Bias for Emotional Faces: Evidence from the Attention and Working Memory Paradigms

Visual attention and visual working memory (VWM) are two major cognitive functions in humans, and they have much in common. A growing body of research has investigated the effect of emotional information on visual attention and VWM. Interestingly, contradictory findings have supported both a negative bias and a positive bias toward emotional faces (e.g., angry faces or happy faces) in the attention and VWM fields. We found that the classical paradigms—that is, the visual search paradigm in attention and the change detection paradigm in VWM—are considerably similar. The settings of these paradigms could therefore be responsible for the contradictory results. In this paper, we compare previous controversial results from behavioral and neuroscience studies using these two paradigms. We suggest three possible contributing factors that have significant impacts on the contradictory conclusions regarding different emotional bias effects; these factors are stimulus choice, experimental setting, and cognitive process. We also propose new research directions and guidelines for future studies.

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Promotes Positivity in the Face of Emotional Ambiguity

Reducing negative impacts of stress benefits physical and psychological well-being. Mindfulness training is one well-known method for reducing stress responses and is associated with reductions in self-reported negative affect, but essentially no research has targeted behavioral outcomes of emotional processes throughout long-term mindfulness trainings. For example, responses to emotionally ambiguous signals (e.g., surprised expressions), which might be interpreted as either positive or negative, offer unique leverage for assessing the effects of mindfulness on emotional bias. Here, we directly compared the effects of short- and long-term training via Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction on ratings of faces with a relatively clear (angry, happy) and ambiguous (surprised) valence. Ratings became more positive for surprised faces from the start (Week 1) to end of training (Week 8; p < .001), but there were no short-term (from a single class session) effects. Notably, this shift towards positivity continued through an additional eight-week follow-up (Week 16; p< .001). Finally, post-training valence bias (Week 8) was uniquely predicted by non-reactivity rather than any other mindfulness facet (p = .01). Thus, mindfulness appears to promote a relatively long-lasting shift toward positivity in the face of emotional ambiguity, which is uniquely supported by reduced emotional reactivity.